Game 180: DND (1984)

The opening screen from the 1988 version. The original version lacks a title screen.

DND

United States

Bill Knight (developer); published as shareware

Released 1984 for DOS; version 1.2 released 1986; version 2.0 released 1988 and re-titled Dungeons of the Necromancer's Domain
Date Started: 14 March 2015

Date Ended: 15 March 2015

Total Hours: 8

Reload Count: 9 characters; 15 reloads on "winning" character.

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 18

Ranking at Time of Posting: 32/182 (18%)

Ranking at Game #431: 106/431 (25%)

Here's another mid-1980s offering that deserves an official number and GIMLET, something I didn't give when I offered a few paragraphs on it as part of my "backtracking" series in 2010. I recently did the same with Caverns of Zoarre, where I covered the history of the DND line.

Briefly, DND goes back to The Dungeon ("pedit5") and The Game of Dungeons ("dnd"), two of the earliest known RPGs, created by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975. It was adapted (or plagiarized, as some have it) to a variety of other systems by Purdue University student Daniel Lawrence in the late 1970s, and many of the people exposed to it decided to try a hand at their own versions, including C. Gordon Walton's Dungeons of Death (1979), Daniel Lawrence's Telengard (1982), Bill Knight's DND (1984), Thomas Hanlin's Caverns of Zoarre (1984), and another DND from 1985 sometimes called "Heathkit DND." What we're notably missing is Lawrence's pre-Telengard versions; most were discarded as potential copyright violations when Telengard was published by Avalon Hill.

Inspired (of course) by Dungeons & Dragons, the games all feature limited mechanics, rapid random encounters with both enemies and special objects, and death that is quick, frequent, and usually permanent.

All of them feature thrones that you can sit in or pry jewels from, but I'm not sure where this started.

        
This version was developed by Bill Knight of R O Software in Plano, Texas, in 1984, after he found some variant of Lawrence's DND kicking around on a DEC computer at work. In 1988, he re-released it as Dungeons of the Necromancer's Domain after some legal threats. The source of the threats is a bit cloudy. In Dungeons & Desktops (relevant chapter offered online here), Matt Barton says of the dispute:

The game was successful enough to attract Lawrence's attention; he saw it as unfair competition and did what he could to prevent its distribution. For his part, Bill claimed that he had done enough work cleaning up the "spaghetti code" of the original game that he had in fact created a new product. In any case, Bill updated the game and rereleased it as Dungeon of the Necromancer's Domain in 1988, which he claimed was a "ground-up rewrite" in an effort to avoid future conflict with Lawrence.

While I have no reason to doubt Barton, I haven't been able to find any primary sources to corroborate this history. Slightly contrasting Barton's account is an account from this site (which is otherwise absolutely riddled with errors) in which the author claims to have corresponded with Bill Knight and that Knight didn't even know the name of DND's author until the time of the correspondence (which seems to have been in the mid-1990s).

In an e-mail to me, sent about a month after this post was originally published, Knight said that the legal threats came from "the folks that market the DND board game," by which he might mean TSR itself. It's thus possible that the change to Dungeons of the Necromancer's Domain had nothing to do with Lawrence.

Whatever the case, no one's hands are perfectly clean here. I don't have Lawerence's DND to compare against Knight's, but it's clearly similar enough that it was a bit unethical for Knight to sell it, no matter how much code-cleaning he'd done. On the other hand, it was disingenuous of Lawrence to try to stifle other versions, given that he himself had copied DND from Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood's PLATO original. (While Lawrence may not have threatened legal action against Knight, there's evidence that he did against many earlier DND derivatives.) In a 2007 interview with Barton, Lawrence claims he wasn't aware of the PLATO game and feebly offers that "some of my play testers may have well been giving me suggestions from their experiences elsewhere." Given the similarities between the Game of Dungeons and DND derivatives like Telengard and Bill Knight's game--let alone Lawrence's original--I believe that Lawrence was lying or at least significantly mis-remembering. I don't think the original PLATO dnd was available on Cyber1 yet, so he may very well have been counting on the fact that no one could really compare the two games. In any event, Lawrence died in 2010, so we can't get his clarification on any of this.

Ironically, Bill Knight's DND might be the most faithful recreation we have of what Daniel Lawrence's DND looked like on the Purdue mainframes, and it clearly shows many elements--a main quest involving an orb; "excelsior" transport between levels; use of WAXD for movement; magic books that increase and decrease attributes--that go all the way back to dnd on PLATO.

Combat in version 1.2 (1986).

Combat in version 2.0, redubbed Dungeons of the Necromancer's Domain. The entire line offers minimal combat options, supplemented with spells (for some classes).

Both of Knight's versions play roughly the same, meaning I'm going to decline offering two separate posts about them. DND is more graphically primitive, using all ASCII characters, and even the 1986 version has all but two of its dungeons listed as "under construction." Necromancer updates the names of the dungeons (curiously, one of the original DND dungeons was called "Telengard") and doesn't indicate that any are incomplete. Necromancer also has more thorough in-game documentation where DND relies primarily on external files.

Character creation in the 1988 version. I admire how Knight pulled the dungeon names from the fathomless depths of his own creativity.

I like the original game's dungeons a bit better; they have more defined rooms and corridors; the Necromancer version's dungeons are more maze-like. Finally, the original DND offers more experience for battles than Necromancer. In the latter game, you hardly ever level up from killing foes, and the focus is on gaining experience points through accumulation of treasure. The first edition is better balanced this way.

In both versions, you can play a fighter, cleric, or magician. There's a selection of 24 spells for the latter two classes (in DND, clerics only get 16 spells), and fighters can find magic wands that give them spell-like capabilities. Unlike most DND derivations, this one has a reasonably complex inventory system, with the ability to spend accumulated gold pieces on weapon and armor pluses; magic items like Rings of Regeneration and Elven Boots; maps of the dungeon levels; and "transportation" among the different dungeons.
       

A cleric selects from a variety of spells.

     
Exploration is classic DND: as you move around--or even stand in the same spot--you encounter monsters, piles of treasure, and magic items. Fixed encounters include thrones, fountains, chests with buttons to push, altars, arcane books, and magic mirrors, and generally--like in most DND derivatives--the outcomes of fiddling with these things is completely random. You might gain treasure, find yourself in a difficult combat, take damage, get healed, lose attributes, get older, gain experience or an experience level, and so forth. Each level has an up and down staircase and an "excelsior" transport between levels. Pits, teleporters, and elevators move you up and down involuntarily.

Some of the game's many random encounters.

Monsters are drawn from the Dungeons & Dragons mold, and include trolls, vampires, giants, dragons, dopplegangers, dwarves, and harpies. Like the character, monsters all have a level. Moving downward in the dungeon adjusts the maximum or average level of the monsters you face but not the minimum; you might still meet a Level 1 ogre on Level 12 of the dungeon.

Hit points don't regenerate when you move, but it's not long in the game before you find a Ring of Regeneration to take care of this. Other magic items include shields, armor, weapons, and boots, all with a plus level between 1 and some distant maximum. As with the typical DND game, death removes the character file from the disk and forces you to start over.

This message is quite common at early levels.

The Knight versions have some elements I haven't seen in other DND titles, although of course I can't be sure which ones he invented and which he adapted from one of Lawrence's versions. For instance:

• When you return to the surface, gold both converts to experience and remains in a stored inventory so you can spend it on goods.

• Rather than spell points, the game uses a spell "slot" system similar to Wizardry. Spell slots regenerate slowly while still in the dungeon.

• There are "magic torches" (as well as various light spells) that reveal the encounters in the squares around the character, not unlike the flares in the Wizard's Castle variants.

• The game allows you to purchase level maps of the various dungeons. When you purchase one, it actually creates a text file in the DND directory with the name of the dungeon and the map level. Unfortunately, the maps are extremely expensive and don't annotate special encounters or stairs, so they're of limited utility.

In the shop. I guess it'll be a while before I can purchase this map.

The output of a cheaper map purchase.

As with most DND games, staying alive is very hard for the first few character levels. After that, it evens out, and a cautious player can stay alive effectively indefinitely (while rarely advancing, however). I had the most luck with a cleric character, who I managed to get to Level 9 in about 4 hours of gameplay, making liberal use of the "Hold Monster" spell on dragons, balrogs, and other nasty monsters.

This dragon is "helpless" from my "Hold Monster" spell, meaning I get to attack him for a while without retaliation.

Needed experience points double between levels, plus the game awards you fewer experience points for slaying monsters below your level, so advancement is very slow after around Level 7, and it's basically dependent on hitting lower dungeon levels and returning to the surface with huge treasure hauls. I think the maximum level in the game is 999; the help file says that will require 190,272,000 experience (about 1,000 times more than I earned in 4 hours). If you ask about Level 1000, the game says "you should be so lucky!"

The introductory help file has some text that suggests a main quest in the game:

The legend that holds the most interest for fools--I mean adventurers--such as yourself is that of the orb, an enormous eye-shaped gem which, if gazed into, grants its finder immortality. They say it was created and hidden by a mad wizard long, long ago and still waits deep in the musty tunnels and dank caverns, guarded by enormous dragons and, er, well, never mind.

I assumed the orb exists in all 5 dungeons and on the bottom level of each of them, and I decided to cheat just to document the endgame. After my Level 9 cleric died, I created a new character, a magician, and started using backups of the game file to make sure he survived. When he reached Level 9, I used the transporter to go directly to dungeon Level 20 (the highest level) and started scouting for the orb. I was there far too early, and I had to restore the character file very frequently (I think someone playing with permadeath would have to grind up to Level 20 or higher to survive "for real").

This is a pretty awesome spell description.

      
Eventually, I found the ORB in some corner on the level. I picked it up and headed back to the transporter, only to find that the transporter didn't work. I sighed and started the long search for stairways to climb up 20 levels to the surface. Fortunately a random teleporter on Level 17 took me immediately out of the dungeon. However, the game gave me absolutely no indication that I'd escaped with the Orb and won. So that was kind of lame.

The closest I can get to a winning screen.

   
DND scores only 18 on the GIMLET, hurt by a lack of any story and NPCs. It does best (3s) in the variety of special encounters, "magic and combat" (mostly for its spells), and the economy. I'd call it slightly better than Caverns of Zoarre but not as good as the wacky Telengard.

I destroy a Level 4 vampire with a spell.

The DND games are fun diversions, but their fundamental problem is that they depend too much on randomness and too little on skill. It's not surprising that the line didn't survive the 1980s while roguelikes--which offer much more complexity and creativity--did. I'll offer a quick post on the Heathkit version in 1985, but otherwise I'm not sorry to be leaving this early branch of CRPGs behind.

*****

In list news, if anyone wants to see me play John Carmack's Wraith: The Devil's Demise, someone is going to have to help me out with an Apple IIgs emulator. The only one I could find for Windows, KEGS32, is impenetrable in its instructions. I managed to get a ROM file working with it and to (I think) mount the disk, but none of the regular Apple commands seem to work right, and there are no helpful menus or auto-launching options the way some emulators offer. Moreover, the emulator doesn't have a "save states" option, so I'll need to ensure that the game, if I get it running, is properly saving to a blank disk. Until I figure it out or some help comes along, I'm listing it as "NP."

*****

Further reading: Posts on the entire DND line: The Dungeon (aka "pedit5," 1975); The Game of Dungeons (aka "dnd," 1975); Dungeon of Death (1979); Telengard (1982); Caverns of Zoarre (1984); and the Heathkit DND (1985). For a discussion of Lawrence and plagiarism, see this account by one of The Game of Dungeons's original authors.